“Curb or … ?” Her question fizzled as she peeked inside the trailer. “I took care of it,” Henry said. “Figured I’d spare you the moving costs.”

That brought back her spark, gave her something to bite.

“Spare me the cost? Ha. That’s all on you, boy. Still gonna owe them two the minimum for driving all the way out here. And plus it’s a holiday. Might be extra, time and a half, you got that?”

Henry swallowed. Sure, he said, that was fine. That was perfectly fine, just throw it on his tab. Oh. And he supposed she’d be wanting these, huh.

The house keys jingled and dropped into her mitten.

Sandi stammered, apparently furious that Henry wasn’t as well.

He was, though. Of course he was. But rather than cave to this urge to either brawl or weep, he just swallowed it down one more time, then smiled.

“If you wouldn’t mind, Sandi.” He took a dainty sidestep past her, nodded to the movers, then led Junior by the hand out the front door and down the steps.

Detecting a weight, a reticent lag, Henry cranked his and Junior’s fastened hands behind them, then gave their arms a stern swoop forward, as if trying to swing the boy up into the air and launch him over the parked truck. Henry looked down, the boy looked up. Henry winked, the boy grinned, and then his little arm tugged Henry’s bigger one back for a final pendulum lunge before they detached, splitting ways for their respective sides of the truck cab.

“Oh, and so, Sandi,” Henry said, pausing at the truck’s door. “One last thing.”

Junior sprang into the cab. He straddled the center console and started rubbing the frost on the rear window. After buffing a porthole into the cold gauze, he set his chin to the backrest, settling in to watch.

Sandi joined the movers’ steaming silhouettes, now a row of three human smokestacks. She crossed her arms. Her head cocked as if to ask Henry, huh? What now?

“Just want to make it clear that I don’t got no hard feelings about all this. I know it’s just business. And, like I told you before, you’ll get your money. We’ll be back. That said, we sure would appreciate it if you tried keeping this one vacant and ready for us.”

A burly scoff. Sandi barked through the inventory of his debts: three months back rent, association dues and sanitation bills running back till June, move-out cleaning fees, and Henry’d best not forget about these here moving guys. She made a hatchet of her mitten to chop at syllables, saying his punk ass wouldn’t be getting back into any one of their properties without settling all that up, with interest, on top of first month, last month, and a security deposit—in cash and up front.